The Toilet Snorkel

The Toilet Snorkel Could Save Your Life

The theory behind the toilet snorkel
is that you are likely to become trapped in the
upper floors of a burning high-rise building —
a hotel, an office building,
or a high-rise apartment or condominium building.

Most of the building is above the reach of any
fire department's highest-reaching ladder trucks.
You don't have firefighters' protective suits,
helmets, masks, and breathing apparatus.
What can you do?

Well, if you had prepared by bringing along a
toilet snorkel, then you could squat beside the
toilet and breath sewer gas until the fire is put
out, or firemen arrive with rescue breathing equipment,
or the building collapses.

The toilet snorkel
could save your life!

Or maybe it's just one more thing to worry out.

William O. Holmes
filed for a U.S. patent in February, 1981, writing:

The recent rash of fires in high-rise hotels and deaths
occasioned thereby has given rise to the need for a
breathing device and method for supplying a hotel guest
and/or fireman with fresh air until he can be rescued.
The device and method of this invention provide for the
insertion of a breathing tube through the water trap
of a toilet to expose an open end thereof to fresh air
from a vent pipe connected to a sewer line of the
toilet, to enable the user to breathe fresh air
through the tube.

We live in an age of wonders!

The toilet snorkel hose has a soft elastomeric
(rubber or plastic) snorkel-type mouthpiece
"having a teeth-engaging bite ring [18] formed
integrally therewith",
thus enabling the user to
"bite-down onto the mouthpiece to hold it in sealed
communication with one of his respiratory intake
passages (mouth)."
Well, yes, that will be your mouth, unless you are
one of those rare individuals with teeth in your nostrils.

As he says:
"It is well known that upon flushing of the toilet,
a water trap will form in the toilet bowl to
block sewer gases from entering the bathroom
proper.
Conversely, the water trap functions to prevent
toxic smoke in the bathroom from passing thereby."

So, the device provides the lesser of two evils:
you can breathe sewer gases instead of toxic fumes.

But wait, there's more!

A filter canister (item number 22 at right) filled with
charcoal can be used
"to adsorb any noxious or toxic impurities which
may be contained in the air inhaled by the
user."

The inventor recommends that the toilet be freshly flushed
to expel accumulated sewer gases from the air chamber within
the rear of the toilet (#25 above), which
"will also automatically create a suction effect in
sewer line 13 to draw fresh airinto chamber 25 of the toilet that is in open
communication with air vent 15.
Such flushing will also automatically create a
suction effect in sewer line 13 to draw fresh air
into chamber 25 via the fresh-air vent.
Water trap 14 will automatically be formed,
as is well known."

The user inserts the tubing end of the snorkel
through the water trap, places his mouth on the mouthpiece
and blows out the small amount of the water and then he's
ready to
"start inhaling fresh air and oxygen through the
device and exhale through his nose.
The user can maintain this breathing procedure
for hours and until he is rescued."

He explains that our hypothetical trapped hotel guest
can even rescue a fireman who has depleted his oxygen tank
by buddy-breathing on the toilet snorkel.

It uses a large bellows mounted onto the toilet bowl rim,
and so it is not the sort of small object that can be
stashed in the typical traveling businessman's rolling
suitcase.

This apparatus would need its own piece of luggage,
preferably hard-sided.
Business travelers with enough annual airline miles to
qualify for their airline's elite traveler program can check
two pieces of luggage for free.
The rest of us will have to feed the airlines' insatiable
greed for add-on fees if we are going to bring our
toilet snorkel bellows along on our trips.

Vigorous pumping could provide an air supply for
the stranded hotel guest plus all members of a fire rescue
team with no need for passing around a shared mouthpiece.

I really like the U.S. Patent Office's use of
Victorian-era illustration style.

It makes these contraptions look even more like
something that Wile E. Coyote would assemble from
the inventory of the Acme Corporation.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.